The latest issue of the Creativity
and Innovation Management journal features an insightful study of team
leadership, ‘Authenticity and Respect: Leading Creative Teams in the Performing
Arts’. In it, Dagmar Abfalter, a
researcher at the Innsbruck University School of Management, analyzes how the leadership of teams of creatives
is conducted in two theatre companies in Austria and Germany. She focuses
specifically on the challenge of leading a team or company with diverse creative
talents and expertise.
Many of the conclusions are familiar. Four traits and practices initially emerge as
critical to effective creative leadership:
- clearly defining success and then leading the team in achieving that goal,
- exercising ethical and authentic behavior,
- extending respect for talent and process,
- and granting autonomy and freedom to individual creative and the team overall.
Yet Abfalter also notes something else consistently present
in the leadership of creative teams at the theaters – a fifth trait and
practice she calls the ‘dark side of leadership’. By this, she primarily means the imposition
of hierarchy and the practice of authoritarianism. Often, this dark side translates into expressions of
narcissism or self-aggrandizement by leaders who can demonstrate a lack of respect
for or even degrade their creative experts.
The unsurprising results of such treatment are strong negative feelings
and emotions among creatives that undermine team production.
More unexpected is another finding. Despite the negative outcomes, the vast
majority of those on the creative teams did not
want to change the hierarchical structures or diminish the authority of the
leader that enabled the ‘dark’ behavior.
Team members didn’t propose entirely flat or circular team designs, for
example, or having a leader without clearcut or meaningful authority. Hearing this, we might reasonably conclude
that hierarchy and authority can be used by leaders either positively or
negatively and that a goal should be to reduce the latter in order to maximize
the former.
For all of us as leaders of creative teams, though, Abfalter’s
article also provokes a more valuable question: How can we develop and practice the more positive aspects of
creative leadership like respect, authenticity and autonomy we aspire to
without having to resort to rigid hierarchies or the destructive exercise of
authority? Part of what’s needed, of
course, is vigilance about the potential dark side of every positive leadership
trait or practice, for instance, of leaderly authenticity threatening to become narcissistic. Also essential is
resisting the regular temptation, even when driven by the best of intentions,
to impose beliefs, standards, processes or practices on creative teams that
increase dysfunction or stifle team effectiveness rather than empowering
creative productivity and performance.
How do you resist the ‘dark side’ as the leader of your
creative team?
Abfalter’s full article is available here.
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